


The Way Out is Through

by Nerissa



Category: White Collar
Genre: Captivity, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 10:56:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16575116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerissa/pseuds/Nerissa
Summary: A few reckless choices, past and present, land Neal and Elizabeth in a tight spot.Good thing they play well together.





	The Way Out is Through

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lirin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/gifts).



“Is it strange that I want a bath?”

Neal considered the top of Elizabeth’s head, then adjusted his shoulder so she could settle more comfortably against it.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “I think in times of stress it’s probably normal to want a return to the . . . well, the . . .”

“Womb?” Elizabeth said dryly. Neal shifted again, this time in acknowledgement that she had figured out the direction of his unspoken thought.

“A womb-like environment, at any rate,” he conceded.

Her head drooped against him once more, and he pushed back against the new thoughts that crowded in. Remorse came first, useless, counter-productive. What good did feeling sorry do either of them now? And hard on its heels came guilt, irrational, absurd. He had offered to help her! Why should he feel guilty for this?

 _Because she’s not part of this life_ , the answer sought to invade, and he pushed it back, but the damage was done. Peter’s wife or not, El didn’t fit into things like this. Like this . . .

He glanced around, dubiously, trying for not the first time since they’d arrived in it to correctly categorize this room.

Cellar? It was dark, almost pitch black, and damp enough that it could not be mistaken for an above-ground apartment. But while it could have fairly been called a cellar, it was somehow also more than that. Somewhere something dripped, with a steady monotony that would probably drive them mad inside of a year, if they were left alive long enough for the deed to be done. Cold seeped through the old stone floors, some of Manhattan’s almost extinct unrenovated real estate, a holdover of an era when the things you buried in cellars might be bottles of contraband booze or the bodies of the Prohibition agents who came sniffing around after it.

Neal took a rapid, mental leap back from the thought that verged on his consciousness. No use bringing cemeteries into it right now. Didn’t set the right tone for the daring escape he’d need to plan, once his head stopped throbbing.

Which it would do a lot sooner than not, if only that water would stop dripping in the corner of this nasty little dungeon.

He’d been so intent on not imagining bodies buried under them, he had no defence against this new fantasy: godforsaken depths, sound-obliterating stone walls and, somehow, because _dungeon_ . . . chains.

El, again with an almost uncanny comprehension of the track of his thoughts, spoke into his clamoring silence.

“What is this, anyway? Somebody’s personal dungeon?”

“Oh, I don’t think . . .” he began, then wondered what purpose conning El against her own mental acuity could possibly serve. They’d both need all their wits about them for this. So Neal Caffrey, out of necessity, as always, deferred to the truth.

“It sure seems that way, doesn’t it?” He waved an airy hand around, careful not to clip it against the rock wall at his back. “No better accommodations for rats north of Midtown.”

“Seriously,” Elizabeth muttered, stirring restively against him, “who keeps people in a dungeon? For that matter,” warming to her point, “who keeps a dungeon?!”

Neal, recalling one injudicious date very early in his career, declined to answer. Instead he sat up and directed her attention to a crack of grey light high overhead.

“That has to be a street-level window,” he predicted. “Painted or boarded over, but it’s probably our best bet.”

“You don’t think we should try the door, first?”

He shook his head, then regretted the roll of nausea it generated.

“The door would take us back up through the house. I don’t think that’s our safest bet. Whoever went to the trouble to put us down here isn’t likely to want us waltzing back out again any time soon.”

He got to his feet, shucked off his jacket and gave a slow, experimental stretch.

“We need to climb.”

 

**Twenty-Four Hours Earlier**

 

“So this is the stuff that’s fetching the big bucks these days, huh?” Peter leaned in to squint at an offering on display, then reared back, impressed in spite of himself. “Huh. I like it.”

“There’s been a demand for nostalgia of late,” El explained, slipped her hand in the crook of his arm and smiling fondly on his surprised approval. “The wartime pieces are making a real comeback. This entire collection should draw a lot of interest. So glad you were able to recover it for them, Honey. You should be very proud.”

“Well,” Peter snugged his hand over top of hers, conscious of vague warmth at her approbation, “it wasn’t so difficult, really. Regular insurance scam. All back and accounted for, and it was nice of them to ask us here tonight for the viewing before it goes up for auction tomorrow.”

His attention was arrested by the arrival of a stately, square-shouldered figure. The collection’s appraiser, whose white air was arranged so artfully as to suggest it might be party to concealing its own gradual recession, extended both hands to clasp the one offered by Peter.

“A rare find,” he said heavily, “a most impressive recovery on your part. Cannot thank you enough, Agent Burke . . . and, Mrs. Burke, is it?”

Elizabeth offered her own smiles and compliments on the artifacts arranged around them.

“Yes, yes, these wartime pieces are drawing much interest these days. Not always, of course, from the right parties,” a shadow of apparent recollection darkened his features momentarily, “but then, any fad will sometimes have that effect. And these times we live in . . .” he trailed off again, his attention evidently caught by the same collection of sketches that had drawn Peter’s warm admiration.

“These, now,” he said, tracing the pad of his thumb over the glass that pressed down on the sketches, bolted neatly at all four corners to pin them in place, “these should bring the right kind of interest, I hope.”

“My husband was just admiring them himself,” Elizabeth said.

“Are you an admirer then, Sir?” the older man turned fierce, eager interest on Peter, who was somewhat taken aback by the intensity of it. “A devotee of his work? There is very little of this period left remaining. That fire in the east wing of the museum two years ago, and the archives loathe to part with their own collection for any purpose, though you would not think some things would need to stay classified for so long . . . but there, I forget, I am speaking to a government man. Doubtless you have special access to the things that we mere civilians could only dream of. Tell me, are they everything we’re told they are?”

Peter had the look of a man clutching at, then finding himself torn loose of and clutching anew at a series of ever-shrinking life preservers. By the end of the spiel he was visibly foundering.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m not really up on all this . . . here.” He gestured apologetically at the sketches that clearly held such special meaning for the gentleman. “I only liked knowing what I was looking at for a change, if you take my meaning. And it’s funny! The little money, on the, uh, unicycle. Whimsical.” He shook his head in real apology, as though conscious of letting the old man down somehow. “I don’t really know art.”

“Art!” laughed the man. “Oh, they are all right, in their way. Technically sound. But no real genius in them either. It’s the mythos surrounding them that drives the sales.”

Then, perceiving that Peter was still very much visibly at sea, he tapped the glass again.

“Every last one of these, Agent Burke, is the personal creation of Captain America.”

A slow smile split Peter’s features.

“Now this,” he said appreciatively, “is a party.”

 

* * *

 

“How was the party last night?” Neal propped his chin in one hand, watching Elizabeth dice a pair of tomatoes and slide them into the pot to simmer.

“It was one of the nicer work events Peter’s ever taken me to,” Elizabeth admitted, then indicated, with the tip of her knife, a spice bottle on the shelf behind her guest. Neal, obedient to her cue, took it down and passed it over.

“How so?”

“Well,” Elizabeth dashed in some quantity of the spice, and gave the whole thing a stir, “Peter enjoyed himself. Really enjoyed himself. Liked the displays and everything. He seemed really pleased to have been able to recover everything for them, and when he saw the monkey it just put a bow on the whole night for him, if that makes sense.”

Neal’s face went perfectly still, his most abject sign of confusion.

“ . . . The monkey?”

Elizabeth nodded, fiddling with the heat on the stove.

“This little sketch, one of a series. Monkey holding an umbrella, driving a unicycle on a kind of rope. He thought it was cute. And when he found out who drew it . . . Neal, what’s wrong?”

Neal was staring at her in a kind of abashed, blank, blinking concern.

“El, I . . . that was mine. Monkey on a unicycle. Modelled after one of the lost trench drawings I’d read reports of.”

Elizabeth was staring back in open surprise and slight unease.

“Neal, are you sure . . .”

“Captain America,” Neal said promptly. “That’s who was supposed to have done them, right? Makes sense. Most of the stuff Peter recovered was that kind they’re all going in for right now, wasn’t it? Original notes for some of the songs they did, mock-ups of some of the posters the propaganda department did up . . . all the real patriotic memorabilia. The Captain America sketches from that time would fit in with the rest.”

“How do you know they weren’t really Captain America sketches?” Elizabeth suggested, but her unease was not possible to conceal, and Neal, no matter how regretfully, did nothing to abate it.

“The monkey one was lost. Word was he had a small portfolio, leather bound, he kept with him when he was overseas. Some of his work was in there, and my sources at the time indicated it was on him when he was killed in action.”

“Your sources.” Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. “You mean Mozzie.”

But Neal shook his head.

“Moz isn’t into the patriotic line of things. Calls it a commercialization of our lost youth and a corruption of ideals. Won’t touch it. I got my intel from another fellow; something in my line of work. Or, adjacent.”

He looked so extra-open, trying to dance around framing it truthfully, that Elizabeth took pity on him and twirled a scornful wooden spoon in the air before dropping it back into the bubbling sauce.

“All right,” she said, “a thief. And you think he was telling you the truth?”

“It was in his best interest to. We did the sketches as a kind of . . . fun thing. Collaboration. Wasn’t meant to be a big score, they wouldn’t have brought as much in back then. Just wanted to try my hand at it, and he had the stuff I needed. I kept some, he kept the rest.”

Elizabeth was frowning, turning the idea over in her mind.

“So, the monkey sketch . . . did you keep it? Or . . .”

“He did.”

Neal and Elizabeth stood with the kitchen island between them, staring at one another for a long moment. Then Elizabeth reached for her phone.

“I have to tell Peter.”

“El, wait, no,” Neal was around the counter in a trice, holding his palm up pleadingly. “The guy I did them with, he . . . if we could keep him out of it, at his age . . .”

Elizabeth wavered. Neal pressed his advantage.

“It might not even be my sketch. Maybe he sold the info to other forgers, too.”

Elizabeth considered this new information.

“Would you know it?”

“If I saw it, you mean?” She nodded, and after a moment’s hesitation, so did he. “Yeah. If it’s mine, I’d know it.”

“All right,” she turned the stove off with a decisive click, “get your coat. We’ll go right now. If it’s not yours, we can decide from there. And if it is . . . well, we’ll decide either way.”

Neal, seeing no ready alternative, accepted his defeat and headed out the door behind her.

 

* * *

 

The de Momerie mansion was decidedly less lively at midday than it had been the night before. Elizabeth had to ring three times before the door was opened, and a wary-looking caretaker of surprisingly gifted breadth of shoulder for his advanced years stuck his nose out the door, squinting down at them in deep suspicion.

“Yes.”

It was not an invitational statement. Nevertheless, Elizabeth launched into their rehearsed explanation with breathless, determined sincerity. She had been at the party with her husband last night, and her wedding ring—an appropriately naked hand was displayed for inspection—had possibly fallen off. Could she, possibly . . ?

The caretaker plainly desired to say no. His longing was writ large in every line of his dour face. But Neal and Elizabeth combined were an equal match for his stolid reluctance, and they bore in on him, Neal making little gestures and apologetic shakes of his head, Elizabeth laughing and smiling sheepishly, fluttering her hand in self deprecation until, together, they had melted apart, flowed around the bulk of him, and solidified, united, in the entryway beyond the door.

The caretaker turned around with every appearance of confusion, a bulldog got around by two beguiling alley cats, and blinked doubtfully at their continuing protestations of sincere regret.

“Well,” he said at last, ungracious, routed, “come then.” And he strode off in the direction of the previous night’s festivities.

The room was empty of people, boasting only the collection that had drawn the interest of all. Elizabeth began a slow circuit of the room, Neal with her, poking along in the corners and chatting aloud of nothing consequential while endeavouring, with her eyes, to direct Neal’s focus to a kind of half-wall on the other side of the room, with small squares of Plexiglas drilled into the sides and various pieces of paper gathered behind them. Neal, who could have caught the hint if he’d seen it from entirely across the room, casually straightened and indicated that area.

“I’ll check over there,” he said, and sauntered off to do exactly that.

Elizabeth made a conscious effort not to check in his direction at all, probing around in various corners as she began to curve around toward him, casually, naturally, giving, she hoped, ample time for him to steal sufficient glimpses of the sketch in question to establish its provenance.

By the time she reached him he was leaning against the half-wall itself, hands in his pockets, face twisted into a careful expression of sympathy.

“No luck. You find anything?”

“No,” she sighed, regretful, “it must have fallen off in the cab. We’ll have to call when we get home.”

He nodded, deeply sympathetic, and they started for the door with many thanks and apologies under the watchful glare of the caretaker.

He deposited them on the front step, and shut the door behind them with a thunderous boom. Both twitched slightly, in spite of themselves, then started down the street.

“Well?” Elizabeth asked impatiently, once they had gotten several houses away. “Was it?”

Neal sighed, stopped, and turned to face her.

“Yes. There’s no mistaking it. Either mine, or somebody somehow copied my exact technique on the thing, which seems more far fetched than the alternative: that somebody got hold of the thing I did, and decided to pass it off as the real one.”

“Poor Peter,” Elizabeth said morosely, slipping her phone out of her purse. “He’s not going to like this.”

“Well at least we know for sure,” Neal reflected, adjusting his pace to match her slower one as she composed her text. “What are you going to say, anyway? Exactly. It’s just, this guy . . .”

“I’m sorry about your friend, Neal,” Elizabeth said gently, sending the first text and glancing up at him in real sympathy. They were coming upon an alleyway, the gate drawn close across the mouth. All her focus was on him as she spoke. “Maybe, in consideration of his age—“

They drew abreast of it. A flurry of movement caught her eye. She shifted; turned her attention toward it. Neal’s followed . . . too late.

Darkness fell, complete, stifling, entire.

They knew nothing again until they woke.

 

* * *

 

The darkness should have scared her, perhaps, Elizabeth thought. But waking in it with the warmth of Neal beneath her cheek was almost cozy, until the after effects of whatever had been used to subdue them rolled over her, and she was quickly, aggressively sick in a far-ish corner before crawling back to rest her head on Neal once more.

His level breathing settled her stomach, and she was dimly conscious of wanting to return to sleep, and even more dimly conscious of that being a really awful idea, when Neal himself woke and they tried to bring each other up to speed.

They were in a dark place, presumably put there by person or persons who knew who they were, or at least (this was Elizabeth, on whom the drug administered was apparently having a most expansive t-crossing i-dotting mental impact) by somebody who thought they knew who they were, and the persons they were thought to be were, for some reason, disliked or feared by the person or persons who put them there.

Neal, with somewhat greater mental clarity, said that was very thorough, but they had probably better stick to assuming it was somebody who wanted them there specifically, or they’d be there all night just wondering why they were there.

“And we don’t want that,” Elizabeth murmured dolefully.

Neal’s soft chuckle in answer to this went a long way to clearing her head and restoring good sense. It was at that point that she wondered if it was odd to want a bath, and Neal’s perfectly sensible assessment of her desire brushed away the last of the cobwebs, and she felt herself again.

When Neal determined that they would need to climb, she did not disagree. She did not even, as she maybe should have, doubt her head’s ability to handle the change in altitude. She simply saw the necessity of the thing he proposed, and waited for him to test the craggy stone wall for likely footholds before announcing he’d found some kind of a way up, and could he have her foot, please.

She understood the request perfectly, and put her toe into the interlaced fingers and cupped palms of his hands, accepting the boost he gave with a soft grunt, and clutching first timidly, then with greater determination, at the face of the wall.

She found the handholds and one of the footholds he had described in very short order and, with a little more effort, the other foothold as well.

From there, she began to climb.

It was the most painfully slow going and she cursed, many times over on her ascent, the wall, her predicament and herself with equal aggression.

She had let Neal talk her out of communicating with Peter first. Of course she couldn’t blame Neal for her choice, exactly, but she still felt he was owed more than the usual person’s share of blame because Neal, really, was not the usual sort of person.

He was the person who would charm you for his own purposes, and even if those purposes were mostly adorably noble, like protecting an aged old thief from the consequences of _his_ choices, they still weren’t enough to stop her feeling resentful of his willingness to try it in the first place.

Really, when they got out of here, IF they got out of here, she had a good mind to—

Her train of thought stuttered and switched tracks with a rusty lurch.

Under her hand, now, was no cold rough stone but a warmer, smoother surface.

Wood.

“Neal!” she called down. “Neal, the window—it’s boarded over.”

“Can you work it off?”

She was inclined to think not, but a careful tug at the thing revealed it was not solid wood, but only a sheet of particle board, and a loosely-nailed one at that. Four or five good wrenches, only somewhat injurious to her balance, had it half off. Another two, and it flapped to the cellar floor, letting the light flood in.

“Is it locked?”

Until Neal asked, it hadn’t occurred to Elizabeth that it might be. Thankfully the only lock was a kind of metal hinge swung down on the inside, and she worked it out of the little hook it clung to with almost no trouble at all. Levering the window up itself was harder work than that, owing to its rusted hinges and the swollen wooden warpedness of the frame, but by bearing her weight inward against the wall, and taking comfort from Neal’s steady pressure on her ankles, she was able to hoist it up and wedge her head and shoulders underneath to prop it open.

What she looked like, slithering out onto the sidewalk like a fish, it did not occur to her to wonder. She laid there a moment, gasping for breath, feeling her heart lurch reproachfully against the welcome solidity of the New York sidewalk, while Neal shimmied out behind her and sprawled, almost as indecorously, on the ground at her side.

His hand on her back was light; warm.

“Elizabeth . . ?”

“No,” she said, as though he had finished the question. “I’m all right.”

He nodded.

“All right. Just take your time.”

But she had taken it, already, and was sitting up to take in the sight of the mansion at their back.

“It’s the same place!” she blurted, aghast. “The one we were just . . . Neal, do you think the caretaker . . ?”

But Neal was not thinking of the caretaker. He was looking over her shoulder to the figure alighting on the sidewalk from the depths of a government car, and his expression was one of blank apprehension at the storm he knew was to come.

Elizabeth followed his gaze.

“Peter!”

There was space between them, and then, all of a sudden, there was none. She hugged him back, just as fiercely grateful for her ability to do so, accepted kisses, harsh breathing in her ear, his disquiet a comfort. He had been worried, and she had been worried about, and being someone that somebody worried about, as comforts go, was almost as good as a bath.

“I got your text,” he said.

“But I didn’t say where we were.”

“I know. Only I was in the archive when it came. The one he asked about.”

Her confusion was not, she felt, owed to the drug they’d taken. Peter forced himself to back up a little.

“After the appraiser asked me about the archives, I asked around this morning. Turns out he’s right. We have a collection of Captain America memorabilia under lock and key. Not declassified, yet. But I went in, and there, if you’d believe it, was the exact same sketch we were looking at last night.”

“What, the monkey one?”

“Yes. Or well, nearly like. But close enough I knew there was something wrong here, so . . .” He gestured to the collection of agents even now swarming in the front of the building. Neal, hands in his pockets, watched them swarm.

“They won’t be there,” he said quietly. Peter turned to stare at him, suddenly dangerous.

“You _took_ Elizabeth—“

“Not took,” Elizabeth said firmly. “Honey—“

“El, if you knew what that text did to me—“

“I know,” she said, more quietly this time. “But Peter, he didn’t make me come here. It felt like the best idea.” On thinking it over, even now, somehow it still did. But—

“What do you mean,” she looked at Neal also. “They won’t be there?”

Neal looked the nearest thing to sheepish she ever knew he could.

“I didn’t recognize him right away,” he promised. “It was just after, in the basement, I knew why he’d seemed familiar. The caretaker.”

“He was your . . . friend?” Elizabeth asked, but Neal shook his head.

“Not the one I did the sketch for. But he works with him, sometimes. I have to assume this was something they’d planned on together. Selling the stuff, when the time was right. Whether my friend is at it too, behind the scenes, or if he . . .” Neal trailed off. “He wasn’t young even when I knew him. He might be gone.”

“It would be best for him if he were,” Peter said warningly, but the same rough edge was gone from his voice, now, and Elizabeth, comforted anew, fit her hand in his.

“I’m sure he is, Hon,” she said gently. She traded a quick glance with Neal, and the understanding set his shoulders. He backed away softly; unobtrusively.

“And really,” Elizabeth went on, pulling Peter in the direction of the car, “if he’s gone . . . we might as well be, too.” She smiled at him as if seeing him for the first time all over again. “A collar like this, I mean . . . don’t you think you’d better take the rest of the day off?”

Peter’s eyes brightened in a way even the sketch of a monkey on a unicycle couldn’t hope to compete with.

“Oh,” he said. “Well. I mean . . .” he let Elizabeth pull him down for a kiss, like he was the first fresh air she’d wanted after climbing out of the cellar. “I could ask.”

“You do that,” Elizabeth whispered. “You do that right now.”

And as the Burkes lost themselves in the moment, Neal Caffrey slipped down a side street, intent on following his own best instinct.

Elizabeth was right, as usual.

Time to get lost.


End file.
